Matrix Podcast

Recorded on April 9, 2026, this Authors Meet Critics panel features the book Incommunicable: Toward Communicative Justice in Health and Medicine, by Charles Briggs, the Alan Dundes Distinguished Professor and Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at UC Berkeley, co-director and graduate advisor of the UCB-UCSF Joint PhD Program in Medical Anthropology, and co-director of the Berkeley Center for Social Medicine.
Professor Briggs was joined in conversation by Elinor Ochs, Distinguished Research Professor of Anthropology at UCLA, and Eric Snoey, Department of Emergency Medicine, Alameda Health System at Highland Hospital and Clinical Professor in Emergency Medicine at the UCSF School of Medicine. Armando Lara-Millán, Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology, moderated.
The panel was co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley Department of Anthropology, the UC Berkeley School of Public Health, the Berkeley Center for Social Medicine, and the Center for Science, Technology, Medicine & Society.
About the Book
In Incommunicable, Charles L. Briggs examines the long-standing presumptions that medical discourse translates easily across geographic, racial, and class boundaries. Bringing linguistic and medical anthropology into conversation with Black and decolonial theory, he theorizes the failure in health communication as incommunicability, which negatively affects all patients, doctors, and healthcare providers. Briggs draws on W. E. B. Du Bois and the work of three philosopher-physicians — John Locke, Frantz Fanon, and Georges Canguilhem — to show how cultural models of communication and health have historically racialized people of color as being incapable of communicating rationally and understanding biomedical concepts.
He outlines incommunicability through a study of COVID-19 discourse, in which health professionals defined the disease based on scientific medical knowledge in ways that reduced varieties of nonprofessional knowledge about COVID-19 to "misinformation" and "conspiracy theories." This dismissal of nonprofessional knowledge led to a failure of communication that eroded trust in medical expertise. Building on efforts by social movements and coalitions of health professionals and patients to craft more just and equitable futures, Briggs helps imagine health systems and healthcare discourses beyond the oppressive weight of communicability and the stigma of incommunicability.
A transcript of this recording is available at https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/incommunicable.

On April 7, 2026, Social Science Matrix hosted an Authors Meet Critics panel on the book The Insatiable Machine: How Capitalism Conquered the World, by Trevor Jackson, Associate Professor of History at UC Berkeley. Professor Jackson was joined in conversation by Chenzi Xu, Assistant Professor of Economics at UC Berkeley, and Dylan Riley, Professor of Sociology at UC Berkeley. Abhishek Kaicker, Associate Professor of History, moderated.
The Authors Meet Critics book series features lively discussions about recently published books authored by social scientists at UC Berkeley. For each event, the author discusses the key arguments of their book with fellow scholars. These events are free and open to the public. This event was co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley Departments of Economics, History, and Sociology.
About the Book
Today, virtually the entire world lives under the economic system called capitalism, and most people alive have never known another. But as the economic historian Trevor Jackson argues in this powerful book, it wasn't always capitalism, it didn't have to be capitalism, and capitalism didn't have to be this way. How did it happen?
With a firm grasp on history and economics and a keen eye for the telling anecdote, Jackson explains the rise of capitalism from the discovery of the New World to the First World War. A fast-paced work of global history that explores the role of Chinese mulberry trees, Dutch tulips, and whale blubber — along with Spanish conquistadors, Mexican mine workers, and English bankers — The Insatiable Machine traces capitalism's development from the accidental construction of an international monetary system to the creation of banking, the emergence of a new form of slavery, fossil–fuel industrialization, and finally the global capitalist system spread by imperialism.
A transcript for this recording is available at https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/insatiable-machine

The global dominance of the U.S. dollar has long shaped international trade, financial markets, and geopolitical power. Amid shifting global dynamics and the rapid development of stablecoins and other digital assets, new questions are emerging around the structure and evolution of dollar hegemony. How are technological innovation and geopolitical change reshaping the international monetary system, and what possibilities lie ahead?
Recorded on April 8, 2026, this panel brought together scholars and industry voices to examine the foundation of U.S. monetary influence and the role of financial innovation in an evolving global economy. The panel featured Barry Eichengreen, George C. Pardee & Helen N. Pardee Chair and Distinguished Professor of Economics and Political Science at UC Berkeley, Rohan Kekre, Assistant Professor of Finance at UC Berkeley Haas, and Chenzi Xu, Assistant Professor of Economics at UC Berkeley. Brian Judge, Research Director for the UC Berkeley Program on Finance and Democracy at BESI, moderated.
Matrix on Point is a discussion series promoting focused, cross-disciplinary conversations on today's most pressing issues. Offering opportunities for scholarly exchange and interaction, each Matrix On Point features the perspectives of leading scholars and specialists from different disciplines, followed by an open conversation. These thought-provoking events are free and open to the public.
A transcript of this can be found at https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/dollar-hegemony.

Recorded on March 18, 2026, this podcast features a lecture by Julien Migozzi, an economic geographer and Assistant Professor in Development Studies at the University of Cambridge. Dr Migozzi's lecture, "Algorithms of Distinction: Class, Credit Scores, and Property in South Africa," examined how 21st-century class dynamics become connected with data-driven stratification systems, focusing on the digital transformation of property markets.
This talk was part of a symposium series presented by the UC Berkeley Computational Research for Equity in the Legal System (CRELS) training program (https://crels.berkeley.edu), which trains doctoral students representing a variety of degree programs and expertise areas in the social sciences, computer science and statistics. The talk was co-sponsored by Social Science Matrix, the Berkeley Economy and Society Initiative (BESI) Tech Cluster, and the UC Berkeley Department of Sociology. 
ABSTRACT
How do persistent inequalities and rapid technological change shape class formation? Centred on South Africa, the most unequal country in the world, this presentation examines how contemporary class dynamics become intertwined with racialised, data-driven mechanisms of social sorting. Integrating computational analysis with in-depth fieldwork across the suburbs and corporate boardrooms of Cape Town, I demonstrate how digital, legal, and financial transformations have reorganized the housing market around a data imperative. Once based on racial categories to exclude the majority from urban property under apartheid, the market is now structured around credit scoring to allocate mortgages and sort the "good" from the "bad" home-seeker, encoding racial inequalities in seemingly colour-blind market outcomes. Thinking class from the realm of digitized markets, I document and theorize how the making of the South African middle-class rests upon the production of a "mortgaged periphery", where middle-income households earn their middle-class stripes by scoring "high enough" to access debt-leveraged homeownership in gated estates. In this suburban, post-apartheid space, physical fences and algorithmic barriers regulate the production and access to housing wealth, materialising class boundaries through asset ownership, capital gains, property aesthetics, and debt relationships.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Julien Migozzi is an economic geographer and an Assistant Professor in Development Studies at the University of Cambridge, after appointments at Oxford University and the École Normale Supérieure. At the intersection of geography, urban studies and economic sociology, Julien's research investigates how digital technologies affect markets, cities, and inequalities, with a particular interest in housing and financial markets. At Cambridge, Julien is teaching a course on digital capitalism. He is a coauthor of the Atlas of Finance (Yale University Press, 2024).
A transcript of this talk is available at https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/julien-migozzi.

Higher education is facing mounting pressures, from political intervention and financial challenges to attacks on academic freedom. These tensions are visible in the University of California system, where debates over funding, governance, labor, and public mission are increasingly shaping the future of public universities.
Recorded on February 9, 2026, this panel brought together leading scholars to examine the forces challenging public higher education today. Drawing on areas spanning finance, policy, and labor, the discussion explored how these dynamics are shaping the UC System, and what is at stake for students, employees, the public, and the future of higher education.
The panel featured Charlie Eaton, Associate Professor of Sociology at UC Merced; Katherine Newman, Chancellor's Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Public Policy at UC Berkeley and Provost and Executive Vice President of Academic Affairs at the University of California; and Juan Pablo Pardo-Guerra, Professor of Sociology at UC San Diego. The panel was moderated by Christopher Kutz, C. William Maxeiner Distinguished Professor of Law.
The panel was co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley School of Education, the Center for Studies in Higher Education (CSHE), and the Departments of Anthropology, Geography, and Sociology.
A transcript of this event can be found at https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/higher-ed-under-attack.